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Introduction
The use of celebrity endorsers in marketing is a highly prevalent and established practice (Seno and Lukas, 2007; Fleck et al., 2012). The share of celebrity ads (of the total ads aired in television media) is around 25-30 percent in the West (Choi et al., 2005) and can go up to 50 percent in countries such as India (Saxena, 2008). In spite of the huge volume of research on celebrity endorsements, researchers have rarely investigated the effect of celebrity endorsement of brand sales. In one such study, Elberse and Verleun (2012) found sales to increase by 4 percent because of celebrity endorsements. Celebrity endorsement researchers have explored various topics in celebrity endorsements such as source credibility of endorsers (Friedman and Friedman, 1979; Ohanian, 1990; Goldsmith et al., 2000), endorser attractiveness (Kamins, 1990; Caballero et al., 1989; Till and Busler, 2000), celebrity product congruence (Kamins, 1990; Till and Busler, 1998, 2000; Roy et al., 2015), and meaning transfer (McCracken, 1989; Byrne et al., 2003).
In spite of the volume of research in celebrity endorsements there are confounding results (Keel and Nataraajan, 2012) and the search for a comprehensive model of celebrity endorsements is on. A comprehensive model that explains celebrity endorsements would be useful for the practitioners since endorsement is an expensive marketing strategy and there are risks of brand image dilution and financial loss among others. For the academicians, such a model may generate answers for various confounding in the endorsement literature. Such a comprehensive model was proposed by McCracken (1989), who suggested a MTM of celebrity endorsements. The endorsement phenomenon was conceived as a movement of meaning from the personal and professional world of celebrities to a product and then to the consumer via purchase and consumption. Interestingly, the meaning transfer model (MTM) has received the least attention from scholars among other models/theories. Jain and Roy (2016) developed a measurable model of meaning transfer with identified constructs using a qualitative approach to address the need for a comprehensive model of celebrity endorsements. The major constructs in the model were perceived celebrity identity (CI), celebrity meaning (CM), brand meaning (BM) and consumer behavior (CB).
The present study builds on the same paper and empirically validates the MTM of...